“We have very few here now,” said Madame de Ste. Croix. “I mean compared with the first three years of the war. When the Germans think themselves victorious they are ruthless in their treatment of women and of civilians generally. When they are losing they are less cruel.”
I am glad that I did not see the first fruits of German wrath. I do not understand how any one who did see it can ever smile or be happy again. What I have seen is the mild and tempered wrath of a beaten foe. I saw, in what is called the isolation pavilion of that house of mercy, seventeen girls in a condition of health which made it impossible for them to associate with others.
This pavilion had room for twice the number, and in former times, from 1914 to 1917, this one refuge was crowded, crowded with ruined and diseased French and Belgian girls. Now the German army has no time and less opportunity for such bestiality. There were only seventeen girls in the isolation pavilion of that house of mercy in Paris. The youngest girl was fourteen.
They have comfortable rooms, a little parlor with books and a piano, and a kind and devoted house mother. She is a teacher as well, and the education of these pathetic young creatures is carried on daily, as though they had a normal destiny, as indeed some of them have. Recovery, even from their dread malady, is not impossible, and the best medical care in Paris is given them freely.
In another pavilion of this house I saw another group of girls much better off. They had lived through horrors, but their health was somehow preserved. The youngest of these girls was twelve years old, and the hideous thing had happened to her two years ago. I think I have never seen a more tragic figure than this little girl. Her face was white and solemn and her eyes were old. She seldom spoke.
While we were looking at the sewing work and some of the girls were busy making us tea, a friend of the house came in to play the piano for the girls to sing. This is her regular contribution to the work. They sang, these poor little larks, standing around the piano, sang of home and love and all things beautiful.
I sat and listened and thought of peaceful America, where the war is still little more than an abstraction, a fact hardly realized except by the mothers and fathers and wives of men who have gone over.
Perhaps it was unworthy of a reporter, but the sight of these young French girls who have been forced, in the most ghastly fashion possible, to realize what this war means, was, for the moment, more than I could bear. I slipped away and ran to the farthest end of the enclosed garden.
Out of the sound of their voices I sat down and let the most unbearable part of the pain flow away in tears. As I sat there on that garden bench I heard a little soft exclamation. Looking up I saw the youngest girl, the little one who at ten years had had her life wrecked by a Hunnish criminal, more than one, for all I know. This child with the white solemn face and the old eyes stood there, pitying me for a trouble she did not understand. But for her there was only one trouble, and she assumed that I was weeping for that.
She reached out a timid little hand and laid it on mine.